Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Where have your ideas come from? How were you inspired to do what you did?

When we got together as a group, we decided to concentrate on the Indie genre, as this was a genre, which we could relate to.  We also decided to focus on this particular genre as we mostly had that style and thought that it would be easy for us to come up with ideas, which we would do, in daily life. We chose this song as we felt it connoted with an existing band called A-Punk, who is a world renound and successful Indie band. The Miracles song, ‘Cala Cola’ is a relaxed, chilled and stress free song, which we thought, would instantly relate to our target audience of being young and having no cares in the world. When we brainstormed a few ideas, we noticed that the beach and sun were commonly used within the indie genre music videos. For our first idea we thought that we could document our road trip down to the beach, which would link in with our indie genre, but keeping it original, as is what this genre typically likes to do. However, after explaining our idea to the rest of the class, it raised a few issues to us that we considered. They commented on how it may not be realistic to have time to film the whole of the video on the beach. This was a big problem for us as we do not live close to the beach and it would be hard to find a day, which we would all be able to go. We then decided to keep the theme of documenting our road trip but instead of travelling to the beach, we decided to capture a group of teenagers camping. We felt that camping still related to our target audience, as this is what they typically like to do. We think that this idea is still original enough to fall into the genre of Indie. The idea of camping came from Noah and the Wales ‘First days of Spring’ as this is a very well known indie genre band. However, without copying their idea, we still kept the main idea of having the main feature around documenting the journey of our road trip to the campsite.

For my DigiPak and Print Advert I have related them both together and related them also into the music video. I have incorporated the location photographs within the designs as after researching previous Indie designs; saw that their design matched with their music video. By having the print research, it would help the band be more noticed and become popular within their genre with the targeted audience.

How did audience research direct your creativity?

Audience research has helped me a lot to improve and amend our ideas and designs. Firstly, when we presented our Prezi to an audience, which we thought, may relate to our music video, a lot of ideas helped us to divert our ideas and develop them. It helped us to direct our creativity when they created comments such as not being realistic to film at the beach in one day. We brainstormed ideas by firstly viewing different music videos to be able to come up with different ideas, which our targeted audience would be interested in. Also, audience feedback has helped us to improve our rough cut. They expressed that we may need to rethink our performance, as it didn’t really look like a band had performed. After looking at our rough cut and then comparing this with existing indie genre music videos, we definitely thought that it would be a good idea to refilm our performance with using a studio. With the audience feedback, I have constantly referred back to this to help me making any other decisions such as my print advertisements.

How different are your products to ‘real’ media products?

With our music video there is definitely a contrast between ours and a real indie genre music video. You can tell this instantly by the quality of the video camera which we used, as famous productions would use a high quality and focused camera with each shot. They would also have actors and already known bands who had done this before. I think that it would have took them less time also as they would have the shot there and then. However, with us, it took slightly longer as we wanted to make sure we had the right amount of shots and camera angles. We overall did not have the time and budget to build up a professional looking music video. Although we were able to do features which they also do with their music videos. For example, we were able to provide what we would want in a music video as the typical audience ourselves. The band was able to lip sync as they would also do in a real music video. I also think that with my DigiPak and Print advert, they look also like a truly professional print advertisement as they also use software’s such as Photoshop which we had used also to edit our features.

To what extent have you been original?

I would overall say that our music video has been mostly redundant. With a lot of existing Indie music videos, we see that they have taken being ‘unique’ and original up a level with extravagant props, costumes and locations. An example of this would be A-Punk ‘Giving up the gun’ where they use a game of tennis which has nothing to do with the lyrics and also men who don’t really fit in with the indie genre. However they make it work because when thinking of the Indie genre, we instantly associate them with standing out from the crowd and becoming unique with themselves. Originality is what we focused on when trying to come up with ideas for our music video. We wanted something which no one had done before with professional music videos, but how we could link in with the indie genre. When looking back at our audience feedback, they wanted us to change the performance part as they didn’t think that it linked in with the genre which we were trying to portray. I think that by adding the redundant feature of the performance it made the key feature to fall into the indie genre category. Furthermore I would say that our music video has entropic and redundant features, but feel that it has been made original in most ways as we have designed our video around what our targeted audience would prefer to see.